Kids Crafts: Homemade Calendars

As Christmas rapidly approaches it becomes increasingly difficult to amuse the little ones on a tight budget. With cold winter weather and dark evenings it can often mean spending more time cooped up in the house. This is where crafts come in; making your very own calendars couldn’t be easier with this guide. This guide includes a 13 month blank calendar (including December 2012) to print out with plenty of room to decorate, step by step instructions to putting the calendar together and some wonderful Christmas themed printouts to colour in and use to decorate the first month of the calendar.

At the bottom of this guide you can download a PDF containing a blank 13 month calendar and some print outs that your kids can colour in. It has already been optimised to fit well on A4 Landscape orientated paper. Make sure that your printer is set to landscape and then simply print it out.

1. Once you have all 13 pages printed out organise them so December 2012 is at the top and December 2013 is on the bottom and the rest in between are in the correct order.

2. Now you have them all together in the correct order you need to pierce two holes at the top through all the sheets as shown in the below diagram. This is best done by using a hole punch to keep it neat and lined up, but if one isn’t available punching a hole with the scissors works fine too.

3. Once you have a hole through all the pages take a piece of string and thread it through so that each end comes out the two holes on the top sheet.

4. Finally tie the two ends together with a couple of sturdy knots and there you have it a blank calendar ready to decorate.

Decorate the calendar:

Now it’s time to let your little ones creativity really shine, firstly find lots of lovely decorations for each month. Now depending on how much time you are looking to kill, they can either make the whole calendar up front or decorate each month as it comes to it. Doing it each month can help to teach your little ones about different months of the year and the events that happen in them. Some great ideas for things you can use when decorating are:

Once you have lots of images representing the month simply cut them out and stick them on creating a lovely scene or collage for each month. Once complete you will not only have a working calendar but a treasured memento of your children’s creativity that you can keep forever.